J writes: Dallas, I know this sounds silly, but I'd like to send Charlaine a Thank You note and tell her how much happiness the Sookie books have brought me and how much I am looking forward to Book 9. Is there an address where I can send her a note ?

No not silly at all and yes, you can write to Charlaine and I am sure she appreciates getting notes like that.

PW: Did you know going in that Amy would die?Lizzy: Yeah, I went in knowing she would be killed, but by the time we actually got to that part, I was super bummed about it.PW: Maybe that's the cost for spending so much time naked with Ryan Kwanten?Lizzy: He's got muscles that I didn't even know existed! For somebody who looks like they just work out every second of every day, he's just like this totally down to earth nice guy. Nothing like Jason Stackhouse.

Obviously, this book was finished months before Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. Since much of the plot is set in New Orleans, I struggled with whether I would leaveDefinitely Dead as it was, or include the catastrophe of August and September. After much thought, since Sookie's visit takes place in the early spring of the year, I decided to let the book remain as it was originally written.My heart goes out to the people of the beautiful city of New Orleans and to all the people of the coastal areas of Mississippi, my home state. My thoughts and prayers will be with you as you rebuild your homes and your lives.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks to so many people: Jerrilyn Farmer's son's Latin teacher; Toni L.P. Kelner and Steve Kelner, friends and sounding boards; Ivan Van Laningham, who has both knowledge and opinions about many, many subjects; Dr. Stacy Clanton, about whom I can say the same; Alexandre Dumas, author of the fabulousThe Three Musketeers , which everyone ought to read; Anne Rice, for vampirizing New Orleans; and to the reader at Uncle Hugo's who guessed the plot of this book in advance … hats off to you all!

PROLOGUES

Dear Readers,

If you've enjoyed Sookie's adventures, you might be interested in reading other works of mine. In 2005, Berkley published Grave Sight , the first book in a series about a young woman named Harper Connelly.Harper was struck by lightning when she was fifteen years old, and since then she's been able to find dead people. Now in her twenties, Harper and her stepbrother, Tolliver, conduct their unique business on the road.As the two travel from job to job, they encounter all kinds of clients along the way. Sometimes, the body Harper finds has met a foul death … and sometimes, the people who pay her think Harper knows more than she does about who committed the murder.If you think you might like reading about Harper and Tolliver,Grave Surprise , the second book about their investigations, will be on the shelves in hardcover in November of 2006. The same month,Grave Sight will be released in paperback.I hope you enjoy the change of pace.

These days, it can be easy to forget that vampires weren't always the darkly mysterious, come-hither creatures that dominate pop culture in the modern age. (See: Twilight's Robert Pattinson, True Blood's Stephen Moyer and so on). Once upon a time, the fanged ones were more heartstoppers than heartthrobs. And and in no corner of the vampire-movie kingdom was that more true than for Draculas past. Count-for-the-ages Béla Lugosi had the dark part down, that's for sure, but he was hardly the type to get tween girls a-twittering. His seductive powers were more in the hypnotize-the-life-out-of-you realm. Not his fault! Before Lugosi's debut in Dracula (1931), the only real representation of vampires on the big screen came courtesy of famed silent-film auteur F.W. Murnau.

For his film Nosferatu, Murnau did up the titular character (Max Schreck) up in claw hands, corpse makeup and creepy rodent teeth. Not exactly Facebook-friendly.

Fast-forward to 1979, when not one but two new Count Draculas entered the popular consciousness: George Hamilton as the campy Count in the hit spoof Love At First Bite, and Frank Langella in Dracula (1979). Langella, for one, took the character so far away from its sickly origins that his open-shirted Dracula positively glowed with suave, eighties virility. He didn't even have fangs! Which to certain horror obsessives might have seemed like a travesty. That said, most must have liked what they saw, as evidenced by the fact that we've had a veritable parade of sex-machine Draculas dominating the screen ever since: Gary Oldman seducing Winona in Bram Stoker's Dracula, a wind-blown Gerard Butler in Wes Craven's Dracula 2000, Dominic Purcell's romancing-slash-slaying of Parker Posey in Blade: Trinity, as "Drake", to name just a few. And happily for those with fang fetishes, a quick perusal of porny recent straight-to-video movies (The Sexy Adventures of Van Helsing, anyone?) suggests the trend is in no earthly danger of letting up any time soon.

Interview with Generation Kill actor James Ransome from Guardian UK. James Ransome, who plays Person in Generation Kill and Ziggy in The Wire, on acting in two critically-lauded shows.

joedoone: Did Alexander Skarsgard really keep an officer-like distance from the actors playing the other ranks during the making of the series? If so, I hope you gave him a bit of stick about it.

JR: Haha ... I love this one. Yes, he kept his distance from us, but for two reasons that aren't as highbrow as they're made out to be. The first being that the shoot itself was really intense, six-day work weeks with a lot of coverage, and Alex was in almost all of the scenes. So we would shoot all day, from dawn until dusk, and he would go back to his hotel to prepare for the scenes the following day. This was because Alex has a Swedish accent and he wanted it to be as authentic as possible. The other reason he quarantined himself from the rest of us was because when he did go out, he was the wildest party animal I have ever seen. The two occasions we went out, Alex sang the Swedish football anthem and tried to fight an entire town. After that I was like, "Yeah dude, I get why you won't hang out with us, if you get killed or go to an African prison, the producers are gonna be pissed."

The pie Sookie eats in True Blood is quite different from a Texas Pecan Pie or other southern pecan pie recipes because of it's creaminess, a reader suggest this recipe for the 'True Blood Cryin' pie'.

I will post tomorrow about the Kindle. I have used both of these and they are both great.

You can purchase one here(prices start at $299)Sony makes 500,000 public domain book titles available to U.S. consumers for free

Google made Sony's Reader Digital Book more attractive to ebook fans on Thursday. A deal between the two tech giants makes 500,000 public domain book titles available to U.S. consumers for free. The books are out of copyright, which means they were published in 1923 or prior.

Sony's agreement with Google makes available more than 600,000 titles from its eBook Store, compared with 245,000 closed-format titles for Amazon's Kindle.

A button on the front page of Sony's eBook Store leads to the books from Google, which people can transfer to their PRS-505 or PRS-700 Reader at no cost. Those new to the store will need to set up an account and download Sony's free eBook Library software. Consumers without a Reader can read the text through Sony's free eBook Library software on a PC running Windows.

Through the Google Book Search project, the Mountain View, Calif. company has spent four years digitizing books from many of the world's leading libraries, including the Harvard University Library and New York Public Library. Digitized books range from Mark Twain to Jane Austen and other classic authors.

For books published since 1923, Google displays a "few snippets" of text around the search term after scanning it from one of the libraries, according to a Google spokeswoman. Google won't make all digitized books available through the Sony store.

I often love those moments when a hero gets jealous of the heroine. But at other times, the jealous hero appalls me. Here’s why......

CharlaineHarris’sSookieStackhouse series provides lots of opportunities for male jealousy, as Sookie has so many admirers. But nobody does jealousy like vampire Bill Compton. In the second book, Living Dead in Dallas, the two have split up. Jealousy is the push they need to get back together. Sookie attends a high school football game with a handsome former classmate, JB. As JB gives her a kiss, Sookie glances down and sees Bill on a lower bleacher twisted around, “staring a hole in her”. Sookie first thinks it was a “wonderful screw-him moment”, but then immediately realizes “I just wanted him”. This scene precipitates their reunion: Sookie comes home from the game to find Bill waiting for her. They make mad love and afterwards Bill, always suave with the ladies, says, “You smell like him.”

The review for Book 9, Dead and Gone does have an error but it is a real review by a reputable reviewer.

I'm thinking stepdaughter should maybe have been stepfather ..?So, the line "The owner of Merlotte’s stepdaughter almost kills her mother" maybe should have read The "owner of Merlotte’s stepfather almost kills his mother " and we know this from Chapter One which was leaked by Charlaine, herself.

This is what Charlaine said about the mistake and the reviewer, Harriet Klausner.

Harriet does read the books, but she reads about three a day or something amazing like that. I think the plot gets scrambled with the other books she's reading. Charlaine Harris

I have been contacted by 3 people who have received reviewers copies of the book and we will be seeing more reviews soon. I'm sure many, many more details from the book will begin leaking out ...and what I've heard is great !!!

We do now know from the review that Crystal gets killed, Sookie is almost kidnapped and has a romance ...

On the contrary, in the world of True Blood, vampires have been “normalised” into society as an underprivileged minority.

Following the invention of a viable synthetic blood, with which vampires can nourish themselves instead of predating upon humans, the vampire race decided to “come out of the coffin” and integrate openly with the Earth’s dominant species.

Anna Helene Paquin was born in Manitoba Canada to a New Zealand Mother Mary. They moved to New Zealand when she was 4 years old. It was in New Zealand in 1991 that Paquin became an actress by chance. Acclaimed Kiwi Director Jane Campion was looking for a little girl to play a key role in The Piano, set to film in New Zealand, and a newspaper advertisement was run announcing an open audition. Paquin’s sister read the ad and went to try out with a friend; Paquin herself tagged along because she had nothing better to do. When Campion met Paquin—whose only acting experience had been as a skunk in a school play—she was very impressed with the nine-year-old’s performance of the monologue about Flora’s father, and she was chosen from among the 5000 candidates that auditioned.

When The Piano was released in 1993 it was lauded by critics, won prizes at a number of film festivals, and eventually became a popular movie among a wide audience. Paquin’s debut performance in the film earned her an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress at the age of eleven, making her the second-youngest Oscar winner in history after Tatum O’Neal.

When she was younger, she wanted to be the Prime Minister of New Zealand, or a lawyer. We of course look forward to her political career but she is probably going to have to take a paycut.